You Don’t Burn Crosses on People’s Lawns for Sixteen Months then Expect Them to Forget It

You Don’t Burn Crosses on People’s Lawns for Sixteen Months then Expect Them to Forget It November 11, 2016

Photo Source: Flickr creative commons by Gage Skidmore, https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/
Photo Source: Flickr creative commons by Gage Skidmore, https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/

I kind of had a meltdown before I wrote this. I’ve been listening to hispanic people I know and love express their grief and terror over this election. A couple of them told me they cried all night election night and that, even though they love our country, they no longer feel as if they know the people they’ve known for years.

I also have a deep personal horror of President Elect Trump’s treatment of women. I don’t really have words for how upset that made me, or how deeply alienated I feel.

Speaking of alienation, I feel betrayed to the core by our Catholic bishops — not, thankfully, my own Archbishop who DID address the attacks on women — because they did not use their teaching vocation to address these terrible things. I am heartbroken by the almost total lack of moral leadership from our bishops on such grave matters as sexual assault and racism.

Add to that my very great fears for this country under the governance of such a man — a man that I sincerely believe may have betrayed this country to a foreign power to get elected — and you get what I wrote here.

Apologies for the rant. I’m going to publish it because, one-sided as it is, I think it raises valid points that need to be discussed.

Here it is folks. Me, in a political rant.

You don’t put on your hood and burn crosses on people’s lawns for 16 months, then just call April Fool, joke’s on you, when you win an election.

America has elected its first Jim Crow president, and — surprise! — at least some of the people he targeted in his long, scorched-earth run to the presidency are refusing to go quietly into the night.

Protests against the prospect of four years of President Trump’s governance are springing up around the country. They are the logical reaction to the way he won.

I have no doubt that, if Secretary Clinton had won, other protestors would be out in the streets, going at her. It was that kind of hate-filled election. But she didn’t win. Or rather, she didn’t win the electoral college. She did win the popular vote.

What that means in real world thinking is that Clinton haters can put away their torches. Their bogeygirl is gone. It also means that President Elect Trump is facing an angry nation in which more voters voted against him than voted for him.

Our president elect tweeted that the protests against him are “unfair.” Then, in what I think is part of his new, “presidential” persona, he put out an upbeat tweet about being glad that Americans were exercising their rights.

I think he’s somewhat right on both counts.

Americans accept the outcome of elections. That is how we do things. If we don’t like the person who wins, we just fight him right down to the wire on the issues where we disagree, and we reload for the next election.

But we always — always — accept the outcomes of our elections.

These demonstrations are, as President Elect Trump said in his “presidential” tweet, Americans exercising their right to free speech. But they are also a reflection of the fact that about half the people are refusing to accept him as their president.

This is a visceral reaction to the first openly Jim Crow, openly misogynist, possibly traitorous president. Mr Trump became President Elect Trump by riding a racist, misogynist, Putin-loving horse into the White House. He ran a hate campaign from top to bottom, beginning with his racist birther claptrap from long before he was an official candidate.

He has plans for hispanics that mimic what Andrew Jackson did to the Cherokees. He belittled women and directed hate speech at them constantly, calling them dogs and pigs, and bragging about committing sexual assault. He announced that he would jail his political opponent, and he benefitted to the tune of a win from the Russian interference in the campaign in the guise of Wikileaks.

So … what’s not to like? Why would anybody be so unfair as to announce that this racist, misogynist, possibly traitorous man is less than what they want in a president?

That’s what President Trump and the people of this nation are facing. He has signaled that he wants to attempt a hard about turn into a more presidential persona. He has also consigned his “outsider” status to the ashcan by putting corporate interests in charge of key parts of his transition team.

In other words, he is already moving to dump much of what he said that got him elected, even as he goes to work using his manifest skills as a consummate marketer and demagogue to charm the people he has taught to hate him into liking him. He wants to govern this country, or at least sit in the White House in comfort without the sound of half the people chanting that no way is he their president drifting across the quiet of his breakfast table.

The problem with his change in persona is that the other half of the people — the ones who put him in office — expect him to keep his promises. He’s got to figure out how to wiggle out of his plans to build walls, deport millions, listen to the people instead of special interests, restore prosperity by taxing the poor to feed the rich, overturn Roe (which he can do, if he wants, btw) and destroying America’s international alliances in favor of Russia without losing the people — including President Putin — who got him here.

The standard political way to do this — and politicians renege on their campaign promises all the time — is to blame the opposition. “Them dastardly jerks on the other side overpowered my righteous fight” line of blather is politics 101.

It’s been working for pro life politicians who really want to keep Roe so they can use it in the next election for decades. It has worked out just great for other immigration demagogues who run hate campaigns, then turn to what they really want to do once they are elected.

Will President Trump be able to pull off the Svengali switch of convincing the people who supported him that his every failure is due to the nefarious and totally defanged Democratic party? After all, he’s only got the White House, both houses of Congress and the majority of state legislatures. How can anyone be so unreasonable as to expect him to succeed in delivering on his promises from a weak position like that?

He will probably pull off the Svengali switch, at least so far as his supporters are concerned. I’ve seen his supporters make up an imaginary Trump who is a good family man, a moral man, a patriotic man throughout this campaign. They have consistently denied every bit of factual evidence to the contrary to keep that faux Trump of their imaginings intact. Given President Elect Trump’s enormous talent as a demagogue, I have no doubt he can continue to convince them that the sun comes up in the west and the moon is made of green cheese for quite some time.

But there is still that other half of the electorate to deal with; the terrified hispanics with smoldering crosses on their front lawns, the women with scars from sexual assault by men like Trump who have degraded, attacked and hurt them. Those folks are not going to be so easy to persuade. They don’t think President Elect Trump is their messiah. They think he’s the spawn of satan.

And that is our misery, America. We have elected our first Jim Crow, openly libertine, misogynist, possibly traitorous president. We have handed him, not only the White House, but a clean sweep of Congress and the majority of state legislatures. That’s the same level of power that the electorate gave Franklin Roosevelt.

Will he use it to overturn Roe v Wade?

How is he going to wiggle out of his racist Jim Crow campaign against hispanics in order to keep the corporations happy with their cheap labor?

Will he continue to degrade women?

Is he going to create an environment in which misogyny and racism are the political/social zeitgeist?

I am all for him overturning Roe. I’m going to push hard to help him do it. I am also going to push hard to stop pro life people from falling for the lies when our pro life politicians try to get out of doing it — and they will. I’m already getting emails talking about how “tough” the fight is going to be, considering the nefarious powers of the opposition.

Remember this, going into the fight: Democratic senators and presidents have managed to get pro choice people on the court even when they didn’t have the majority in the Senate. If pro life politicians can’t manage to nominate and confirm pro life justices with a clean sweep like this, it’s not because of the Democrats, it’s because they don’t want to.

Politicians need abortion. Abortion covers for and excuses everything else they do, at least in the eyes of pro life voters. Without abortion, We the People might start looking at them without the fantasy thinking.

Christians abrogated every Gospel teaching and moral value we claim to believe except abortion in order to put this man in the White House. We have given him the power and the situation where it will be possible in the course of the next four years for him to nominate a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe. I only hope we have the guts to refuse to allow him and the Senate to weasel out now that we’ve given them the power.

As for that other little problem of having elected our first Jim Crow, misogynist, possibly traitorous president, my hope is that Christians will renew their Baptismal vows and stand for the whole Gospel of Christ instead of the pieces and parts of it that fit their politics.

The Christian witness in the larger society was damaged before the election. Now, it’s pretty much trashed.

We destroyed our authenticity as followers of the carpenter from Nazareth in this campaign. We confirmed Christian bashers’ worst estimates of us with our bland acceptance of whatever evil candidate Trump committed. I most emphatically include many religious leaders, including most of our Catholic bishops, in that column.

We sacrificed the Gospels on the altar of political expedience, and by doing that we won the battle of the election and lost the war of converting our society.

America has elected its first Jim Crow, openly misogynist and possibly traitorous president. America’s religious leaders tossed aside every single Christian value except being anti-abortion to support him.

The question is, what do we do now?


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